CINEMA

In summer 2006, the band Sigur Ros decided to perform a series of free gigs in Iceland as a “gift” to its people. Accordingly, they set about finding venues that they felt would do their elemental music justice: a cave, a plain of volcanic ash, an abandoned herring factory. A 40-strong film crew was hired to make sure that no grateful smile or cheer went undocumented, and the four began their odyssey, along with wives, children and a string quartet. The film’s website talks, in hushed tones, of “one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands, captured in their natural habitat”. The results, unfortunately, are rather more contrived.

Notwithstanding the fact that the band claimed to be “'joining the soul of the Icelandic public'” – they actually say that – Heima is a remarkably self-regarding film: all lingering shots of beaming fishermen and babies delightedly clapping. Interviews with members do little to dispel the air of smugness: clad in sensible jumpers, they talk of doing it “for Iceland” as though they spent the summer founding orphanages, rather than putting on shows.

No one could reasonably go to see this film expecting Die Hard 2. Sigur Ros are, after all, a band who play guitars with cello bows, and who once called an album (). However, as yet another iceberg hoves into view, or a shot of a misty fjord is accompanied by an emotive swell of strings, you can’t help feeling as though you are enduring one band’s misguided ego trip - or some kind of Clockwork Orange-style aversion therapy for addiction to glaciers. A. Cowan
 

 

 

Do or die.

Berlin in the 30s: ace forger, Russian Jew Sorowitsch, is captured and sent to a concentration camp, only to find himself heading up the biggest counterfeiting scheme in history: the Nazis using Jewish POW experts to make millions of fake English pounds and US dollars. Based on an incredible true story, Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky reveals yet another facet of the Holocaust, in what is both a gripping thriller and character study of men in an impossible moral position - fund the Nazi war machine that wants to wipe them out, or refuse and be exterminated anyway.

After the likes of Schindler’s List or The Pianist, Holocaust imagery can’t help but seem familiar and many of those movies’ tropes are recognisable here. But the pacy, handheld, washed-out look and powerful performances maintain the film’s edge. If The Counterfeiters bank notes are ersatz, the powerful emotions it elicits are definitely the real thing. -L. Singer

Michael Winterbottom’s true-life kidnap drama.

For all the controversy drummed up by her playing someone of a different ethnicity, Angelina Jolie emerges from her role as Mariane Pearl proving that an emotionally authentic performance means more than a liberal dosing of fake tan. Michael Winterbottom’s documentary-style drama takes the intense hunt for Pearl’s husband, an American journalist kidnapped in Pakistan and later beheaded, as its dramatic spine and explores how Pearl sets all her energies towards getting her husband home alive. Jolie plays Pearl as courageous and cool, for the large part subjugating her emotions and fear to her devotion to her husband and longing for his return. A Mighty Heart is a restrained yet moving tribute to her quest, drawing us into her plight, despite the shadow of its ghastly conclusion. L. Bushell.